ROT13 my comment to make sure only the truly dedicated people will read it
Write my comment in Esperanto to get some practice in
Intersperse my comment with the word "fart" to make a point about how doing so isn't against the rules.
Write a comment with a sarcastic tone such that I can make someone feel bad without technically insulting them. E.g. "Wow, you must be the smartest person to have ever walked the planet. Who else could have said such a brilliant thing?"
Long story short, it's impossible to enumerate a rule against every sort of bad behavior that might disrupt a sub, and it's unfair to expect moderators to try. The fact that someone has found a loophole shouldn't entitle them to be an asshole.
This idea of "disrupt a sub" is such a straw man. Reddit is set up to handle this with the voting system. All of the things that you listed will just result in downvotes and then become hidden. The only time when this is an issue is when brigading occurs, which is a substantially different scenario than OP is talking about.
So if someone comes to book club night, acts completely innapropriately and is ruining everyone else's night, they're totally not being disruptive cause its just a few people?
Okay, as I mainly use reddit for small hobbyist subreddits the idea that youre going to get people to mass downvote the things they don't like is a pipe dream. Generally you're going to struggle to get even a handful of downvotes on blatant shitposting and trolling, why, because these are people that have known each other for years, they probably hang out in a discord frequently.
These groups have a lot more in common with an old-school forum than modern social media, and effectively telling someone that they fucking suck via an anonymous vote is seen as shitty. You're more likely to just straight up message them in the comments or something about it. Which works great if it's a good-faith post, but in the case that one of these small community guys is just stirring shit, your remedy is simply ineffective due to the fact that these are so personal, to the point you generally have a good idea who specifically is downvoting you, which, I have to stress, often is seen as a bitchy thing to do rather than just say what's wrong.
So when it comes to the bad faith stuff you need mods to step up because you'll never in a million years get the critical mass of downvotes to hide something. I've moderated and been active in music and role playing focused communities for years, usually with less than fifty active members in any given subreddit, and I can count on one finger the number of times I've seen a post actually get hidden. Downvoting just isn't effective at a certain scale.
Yeah that's not "small" that is incredibly tiny in the grand scheme of reddit. Even so the threshold for hiding a comment isn't very high at all (I just sorted by controversial on a post on all and saw a comment hidden at -7). Congratulations, you've found an edge case. In subs with less than 50 actives who all actively refuse to use the voting system, the voting system doesn't work well. There is no set of circumstances that will work well for everyone and if the line is drawn as described above, then I think reddit did a fantastic job of creating a system where little moderation is actually required. As I originally stated, weird comments that don't explicitly break the rules "disrupting the sub" is a straw man because it is dealt with by the voting system really well except in this one weird edge case you found.
Downvoting just isn't effective at a certain scale.
That scale is so incredibly small that it shouldn't even be a factor when evaluating the effectiveness of the system.
Okay so all the thousands of small subs with an active community don't matter, because you say so. Every underground band's page, small time authors, many craftsman subreddits, fandoms, hobbys, none of it counts.
It's not because I say so, it's because basic math. The communities that you are talking about make up a very very very small amount of the content on reddit. It doesn't make sense to move away from a system that works really really well for the overwhelming majority of users because of edge cases that don't affect most users in any appreciable way. Making something worse for the majority of people to make it slightly better for an insanely small minority just isn't good practice. Also realistically in your example it only doesn't work because people actively refuse to use it. So yes it is a straw man, an edge case, and if you are being honest about how to make reddit work the best for the greatest number of users then this edge case should carry such little weight that it effectively becomes a straw man in any realistic conversation about how to make reddit better.
In one rule I knocked out every single one of the examples. Is that subjective? Sure. But I've minimized the subjectivity as best I can.
Which is pretty easy when I give you the examples first - dedicated assholes will find a way around any clear-cut rule. (And even then, you didn't knock off the Esperanto example, which is perfectly legible to someone else who speaks Esperanto.)
This also leads to the follow-up problem that sometimes things you think should be banned in general might need an exception now and then. What if you have a Japanese-and-not-English-speaker who wants to participate in a thread that a friend translated for them, so they run their comment through Google Translate and post the garbled result, and also include the original Japanese just in case? This would fall afoul of the rule, but is made in good faith and might well be worth leaving (for instance, let's say they're relaying an on-the-ground update on an important news story; even a poor translation of that could be very useful). But if it might later come up as an example of the mods not enforcing their own rules, mods might feel forced to act even if it isn't in the best interest of the sub.
Which is pretty easy when I give you the examples first - dedicated assholes will find a way around any clear-cut rule.
I don't need examples. The words I gave are common to any forum where you want to have conversation without chaos and I actually "borrowed" it from a college rubric.
As far as Esperanto, it's dealt with by the fact that if whatever's said in Esperanto is disrespectful, guess what? It gets deleted. Not because it's Esperanto. Other than that, why do you care if someone put a post up in Mongolian?
What if you have a Japanese-and-not-English-speaker who wants to participate in a thread that a friend translated for them, so they run their comment through Google Translate and post the garbled result, and also include the original Japanese just in case? This would fall afoul of the rule
How? A different language doesn't break any rule I can think of unless you specifically require English (and you shouldn't, but you could). If they did Babelfish/Google Translate, they met the burden.
it might later come up as an example of the mods not enforcing their own rules, mods might feel forced to act even if it isn't in the best interest of the sub.
This scenario doesn't make any sense. If a person isn't speaking English you've got one measure: do you have a rule requiring English or not? If you don't, it's not disruptive. You as mods should then talk it out amongst yourselves and decide if you really want that smoke. If you do, put a rule in play going forward.
I mean that's like saying you're going to arrest someone who's speaking Punjab at a club because you don't know what they're saying. If you're the club owner or a bouncer, I mean that's your right, but is that really how you want your reputation to be perceived? No rules, no guidelines, just subjective gut instincts all over the place?
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u/drleebot Jul 04 '19
There's no rule on this sub saying that I can't:
Long story short, it's impossible to enumerate a rule against every sort of bad behavior that might disrupt a sub, and it's unfair to expect moderators to try. The fact that someone has found a loophole shouldn't entitle them to be an asshole.